


Hers

by CastleriggCircle (BanjoOnMyKnee)



Series: At the Beginning AU [2]
Category: Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Genre: AU, Canon can take a long walk off a short pier, F/M, Ichabbie Valentine, Season/Series 01, ichabbie - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-12
Updated: 2018-02-28
Packaged: 2019-03-17 02:47:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13649841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BanjoOnMyKnee/pseuds/CastleriggCircle
Summary: Season 1 AU, a sequel toAt the Beginning.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> _Tea._ God-damned Englishman—though he’d have _words,_ precise, snooty British words, if she suggested that he wasn’t more American than flags and fireworks with hot dogs and apple pie on the Fourth of July.

Less than 24 hours had passed after Abbie’s little tryst with Crane when they discovered that his wife was maybe not quite so dead as they’d thought. She was in Purgatory—a place that hadn’t featured much in the supernatural scheme of Abbie’s Baptist childhood, but she understood the basic concept. 

Katrina Crane pleaded with her husband to set her free. Which, of course, he vowed to do. And, of course, Abbie promised to help him. Katrina was a powerful witch, apparently, and they might need her help to stave off the Apocalypse. Besides, it was the right thing to do. No question about that. 

That didn’t stop it from being just a tad bit awkward, now that their brief but intense session of comfort sex had gone from being two free and consenting adults freely consenting to something that was their business and no one else’s to, well, adultery. 

So there was a long, uncomfortable silence when Crane told her what he’d learned about his wife. She fumbled for the right thing to say— _I’m sorry_ was the first thing that sprang to mind, but that wasn’t right. It might sound like she was sorry his wife was alive…or had the potential to come back to life, or something. It didn’t help that none of this made any kind of sense she would’ve recognized just a week ago.

While she was still weighing her words, he flushed bright red and gave her a decisive chin dip of a nod. “We did not know,” he said in a low, fierce voice. “We could not possibly have known, under the circumstances, and neither of us intended any dishonor toward her, nor to each other. Under other circumstances, the wise course would be for us to go our separate ways, but…”

That was…surprisingly sensible. She nodded and picked up where he left off. “We can’t. We’re the Witnesses, and we have a job to do.”

“Quite right.”

And with the air cleared between them, sort of, they got on with the business of fighting demons and trying to solve the puzzles left for them from Crane’s past. It was stiff and awkward at first. They both had a habit of jumping back as if stung when they accidentally brushed against each other, to the point where they took elaborate care to not so much as even brush fingers when passing a book or a cup of coffee to the other.

But that couldn’t last, not with them working so closely together so constantly. One night when she took a slash just above her knee from a demonic blade, he’d had to touch her to stop the bleeding. The pain was bad enough at first that she only felt gladness to have him there to bind the wound and put pressure on it. Yet when she calmed down enough to notice just how close they were, the strength of his hands, the warm woodsmoke-and-man scent of him—then his eyes met hers. Without having to speak she knew he was feeling the same awareness that she was, and that they couldn’t let it rule them, either by giving into it or flinching away from each other.

And with that they came to a cautious sort of comfort together. They knew the Rules, and they trusted each other to keep them no matter what they might want. Or what they might secretly fantasize about late at night. (At least, Abbie fantasized. She had no idea what Crane thought because the biggest of their unspoken Rules was that they could never, ever speak of what had happened in that motel room or speculate what they might be to each other if only he was free.)

Really, they were doing just fine, following all the Rules and even becoming close friends, nice and platonic, until the incident with the Sin Eater. Afterward, Abbie drove him to the cabin in silence, all the while feeling her anger swelling within her. He wasn’t supposed to just recklessly throw his life away like that and leave her alone! They were the WitnessES. Plural. Called to stand against a seven-year tribulation _together._

“We need to talk.” She put the car in park in front of the cabin and fixed him with a cold stare.

“By all means, Lieutenant.” He fidgeted, not quite meeting her eyes. “But, perhaps…inside? I could make tea.”

 _Tea._ God-damned Englishman—though he’d have _words,_ precise, snooty British words, if she suggested that he wasn’t more American than flags and fireworks with hot dogs and apple pie on the Fourth of July. But, yeah, better to have this out inside. “Sure.” It felt good to kick the car door open and slam it behind her.

They didn’t speak again until they were in the kitchenette, with Crane rooting through the chaotic jumble of canned goods in his cabinets. “Aha!” He spun to face her, a box of Earl Grey and another of Sleepy Time cradled in his big, long-fingered hands. He frowned, brows knitted together in dismay. “Are you quite all right, Lieutenant? Today was most trying, I know, but—”

She couldn’t take any more. “ _Trying._ You damn near kill yourself and you call it _trying? Trying_ is a long line at Costco or your cable goes out right before a new Game of Thrones, not almost dying and leaving me to stop the world from ending all alone!”

“Lieutenant, I—”

“You don’t get to do that, OK?” She closed the distance between them with one step and grabbed him by the shirt front. Didn’t he understand that he belonged to _her?_

The tea boxes tumbled to the floor as he caught her by the elbows, not to push her away but to steady her, to draw her closer. Their breathing had gone quick and harsh, and his eyes were dark, hungry black pupils ringed with blue bright as lightning.

“I won’t. I swear it,” he breathed.

“You’d better mean that.” And with barely a thought, she surged up on tiptoe to kiss him, angry and possessive. Hers, dammit. Some tiny part of her mind that still had room for thought realized she’d broken the Rules. She waited for him to shove her away in horror, but instead he growled low in his throat, deepened the kiss, and picked her up.

Instinctively she wrapped her legs around him and ground against his hardness. With another growl, he tightened his grip on her ass and strode toward the bedroom.

It was nothing like the motel. No cautious, tender exploration. No words. Just her back hitting a creaky mattress and her pulling him down with her and shoving at his clothes, because she didn’t intend to let him go until she was sure he understood his place in all this was with her. And when they were naked together it was a hot, frantic thing, her nails raking down his back, his teeth sharp at the place where her neck met her shoulder—that was good, too, if he was hers then it was only fair that she be his—and at last his fingers entwined with hers, pressing against the pillows, as he drove into her hard and fast and oh so good, forehead to forehead, heated breaths mingling, until she came so hard she almost passed out with it and he followed just after, collapsing into her with a groan.

And still they did not speak. He rose up on his elbows to let her breathe before she had to push him, then blinked at her in the dim lamplight.

Still joined, sweaty and sticky with spent passion—and fear and grief and anger and maybe something a little like love—they met each other’s eyes and nodded. Accepting the inevitability that was them.

Anything else could wait for the morning. Apparently Crane agreed, because he rolled to his side, pulled the blankets up to their necks, and wrapped himself around her, a warm and comfortable big spoon. “Sleep,” he murmured in her ear. And within a few minutes, she did.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Oh, my love, you misunderstood. Do you not know that Purgatory has but two exits?”

Crane awoke in the middle of the night, but not quite in darkness, since they had neglected to turn off the reading lamp on his bedside table before sleep claimed them. For a forgetful half-minute or so he simply basked in the moment. Not twelve hours ago he had expected to be dead, again, this time by conscious choice rather than the mischance of battle. But another way had been found, so now he was here, still in the land of the living, safe in bed with a warm, beautiful, and beloved woman asleep in his arms, a faint smile tugging at her lips as if her dreams pleased her…

…And then awareness hit. Oh no. They had sworn never to let this happen again, now that they knew, but all it had taken to make them fall was the heat of a particularly heated moment. He was a married man; he had made his vows to Katrina before God and man with every intent of fidelity. But he was no longer sure that if he was given a choice between his fellow Witness and his wife, that he would make the only choice a man with any sense of duty and honor ought.

He wished he could tell himself he’d been possessed by some force beyond his control when he carried Abbie to his bed. But no, it had been only him, a bodily expression of a soul-deep promise: _I swear I will never leave you. I am yours, and you are mine._ He had no right to make any such promise, not when he’d pledged his faith elsewhere. 

But, oh God, Abbie. Fierce, valiant Abbie. What was he to do, what were they to do, forced to work together to save the world while battling such overpowering, unlawful desire?

He had no answers. But out of some obscure instinct that he could think better alone, pacing before the fire in the front room, he carefully eased himself out of bed, sighing relief when Abbie stirred briefly but didn’t wake. He pulled on a pair of soft, fleecy pajama pants Abbie had bought for him on their last trip to Target—he owed her so much, he must give more thought for how he might support himself henceforth and repay her—and slid his feet into a pair of knit slippers with Captain America’s shield embroidered on each foot. (Those, a gift from Miss Jenny.)

He padded out of the bedroom, stirred up the fire and added another log, and then made his way to the bathroom. He’d emptied his bladder, washed his hands, and splashed cold water on his face before he glanced at the mirror…and instead of his own bleary-eyed reflection saw the vortex that portended a visit to Purgatory.

In a flash, he found himself standing in a clearing in an icy, midnight forest with Katrina opposite him, some dozen feet away. Even in that eerie, uncanny place he felt his face burn with shame, and he couldn’t bring himself even to close the gap between them, much less to take her in his arm.

If she noticed, if she knew what he and Abbie had done together, she gave no indication of it. “Ichabod, my love, I must warn you,” she began in a voice full of portent, only to blink and stare at him in bafflement. “What on earth is it you’re wearing? Is that common attire in the twenty-first century?”

He looked down, seeing his body as if through her eyes—shirtless, clad only in trousers of a discordantly cheery red plaid and star-spangled slippers. “Oh. These are for sleeping, or for wearing in the privacy of one’s abode.”

She looked slightly less dubious. “Ah. But are you not rather cold?”

_Here,_ he was. Back at the cabin, with Abbie in his arms—no. He couldn’t allow himself to long for her. Not here, not now. “Homes are much warmer now. As is the climate itself…” He shook his head at how inane he sounded, and this was hardly the time or place to explain electric space heaters or global warming. Instead, he sank to his knees like the penitent he was. “Katrina, I must confess…I owe you the deepest of apologies. I fear that I have betrayed our wedding vows. Twice I have lain with a woman” –he didn’t name Abbie out of an instinctive fear that Katrina might seek to do her harm, and since when had he trusted his wife so very little?— “the first before I knew that you yet lived, but the second—”

She held up an arresting hand. “That I yet lived? Ichabod, my love, I am in Purgatory.”

“I know, and I have sworn to rescue you. I promise I will never play you false again, and I will not rest until you are free.”

“Oh, my love, you misunderstood. Do you not know that Purgatory has but two exits?”

He blinked. Certainly the Purgatory of Roman Catholic theology was so constructed, but he’d somehow thought that this dimension shared nothing with it but the name. She’d begged for him to rescue her, to save her from this place, and he himself had come back from death or something very like it, after all. “What do you mean?” he asked carefully.

She lifted her chin. “Simply that I am dead.”

“But you said that you were trapped here.”

“I am, insofar as I cannot enter Heaven, as most do after a far briefer time of testing and purification, and I am still under threat of hellfire and eternal torment that would make this place seem a very paradise by comparison.”

“Oh,” he said, for once at a loss for more words.

“Indeed. I am forced to linger here until you and the other Witness have defeated Moloch and his Horsemen and prevented the Apocalypse. If you succeed, and I aid you in your quest, then I will be granted the right to enter Heaven. I plead that you will be faithful to your pledge to fight for my soul. But as for the sort of fidelity you speak of, a living man cannot be married to a dead woman. Your body and heart are yours to dispose of as you please.”

Dear God. He wasn’t an adulterer. He could go back to Abbie, and they could spend every night in each other’s arms with clear consciences. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, no. I’m sorry.” And he was, truly. His feelings were just more complicated than they ought to be.

Katrina’s smile had a sad twist, and he feared she could read him all too well. “Do not worry over me. I’ve had quite a long time to grow used to being dead. I wish I’d lived longer and grown old at your side, but” –she gave a delicate shrug— “it is enough for me to know I have a chance at Heaven. Find joy wherever you can, my love. You have a long fight ahead of you, after all. But if you become so distracted that you leave me here longer than necessary, know that I will haunt you.”

“And so you should.” His words echoed strangely, and he felt the pull of the living world began to take hold of him. 

“Our time grows short,” Katrina said.

Already she was becoming a blur in his vision. “You spoke of a warning.”

“Oh, yes. The Sin Eater broke your blood bond to the Horseman, but do not trust him in all things. He is—”

***

Crane heard no more, coming back to himself in his bathroom, clinging to the sink to stay upright and gasping at his sleep-pale reflection in what was again nothing but a mirror. He hardly knew what to think, what to feel, beyond a half-guilty relief that he could go back to bed and sleep the rest of the night with Abbie in his arms with a clear conscience. In the morning, all would seem clearer, he hoped, and they could talk it over together. 

But when he opened the bedroom door he found her awake and half-dressed, tugging her shirt over her head. “Crane.” She gave him a wary, measuring look. “I should go.”

He shook his head. “There’s no need.”

“But I…but we…” She shook her head and bent to pick up her jeans from the floor.

“Abbie. I had a vision of Purgatory just now. I saw Katrina.”

She bit her lip and wouldn’t look at him. “Which is exactly why I should go.”

He strode into the room but stopped on the other side of the bed. “No. She told me—we misunderstood. She is dead, wholly dead. She cannot come back to life. When she asked me to rescue her from Purgatory, she only meant to free her to enter Heaven.”

Abbie froze in the act of pulling on her jeans and stared at him, her eyes huge and dark in the dim lamplight. “Oh. Wow.”

“Yes. So…if you wish to leave, of course I will not stop you, but I should very much like it if you stayed.”

Another frozen moment as she considered him. He wished he knew how to interpret that stillness—but if he didn’t know how he himself felt, how was he to begin to guess at the workings of her heart and mind?

At last she kicked the jeans back to the floor and slid into bed, sitting up against the headboard and pulling the quilt to her waist. She patted the mattress beside her in an invitation he readily accepted, and took his hand once he sat beside her. “So. I don’t know what to say.”

He studied their intertwined fingers. “Nor do I,” he admitted. “She was at peace with it, though.”

“Well, she’s known she was dead all along. You didn’t.”

“Indeed. And yet, it isn’t quite the same as if she’d died in our time, and I holding her in my arms as she breathed her last, either. I suppose…I feel as though I’m in half-mourning.” He darted Abbie a sidelong glance. “I must own that I am relieved to know that what we have done this night is not adulterous.”

Her grip on his hand tightened. “So am I. I always swore I’d never be a home wrecker.” 

The idiom, though new to him, was immediately clear. He nodded. “I feel…I feel as though I should hold a funeral for her, though how one does such a thing for a woman over two hundred years dead…”

“Funerals are for the living as much as the dead. We can have a memorial service of some kind, whatever seems appropriate. It might give you closure.”

“Closure. Yes, I’d like that.”

They watched each other in silence. It was a moment of warmth, not heat, but Crane stretched out a cautious hand to touch her cheek. She closed her eyes and leaned into the touch, so he kissed her, as gentle and undemanding as he’d been frantic and hungry before. And then she smiled at him and slid down to lie on her side, stretching to turn off the lamp, leaving them in friendly darkness. He curled against her back, cradling her in a loose embrace as they drifted back to sleep. Not all promises needed to be spoken aloud.

***

Their next unspoken agreement was to not share a bed again or even speak aloud of what they were becoming to each other for the fortnight it took Crane to arrange a suitable memorial for Katrina in the midst of their duties as Witnesses and the Lieutenant's police work. The only exception was the very next morning, when it first struck Crane that they hadn’t used a condom, as Abbie had been so careful that they do that first time in the motel.

He expected horror, or at least consternation, but she only smiled and shook her head. “Don’t worry about it. I’m on the Pill—that’s medicine women can take if they don’t want to get pregnant just then. The condom that first time was more because I didn’t know what kind of eighteenth century germs you might be carrying around, but those blood tests you got after Roanoke came back STD-free.” Off his baffled blink, she clarified. “Sexually transmitted disease.”

He couldn’t help huffing a bit at that. “I could’ve told you I wasn’t _poxed._ ”

“That you knew of. One of the tricky things about STDs is they tend to have long incubation periods, and you could easily catch one from a woman who wasn’t showing any symptoms, and spread it around before you knew you had it. But now you’ve been tested, and so have I, so we’re good. Still, if you’re ever with a new partner, you’ll want to use a condom, just to be safe—”

Crane saw that she was winding up for one of her lectures on Health and Safety for New Residents of the Twenty-First Century, which could go on as long as any of his own so-called _rants_ on the true history of the Revolution, so he held up a fending hand. “I don’t expect that will be an issue.”

She met his eyes, and awareness hummed between them. “I guess not.”

Nothing more was said before the sunny afternoon when he and Abbie gathered with Miss Jenny and Captain Irving at a secluded spot by the river. He read a few prayers, traditional ones from his century, and they kept silence for a time, for Katrina had been Quaker as well as witch. At length, he felt a certain peace settle within his soul—Abbie’s closure, or perhaps even a Quaker’s spiritual prompting—and he knelt on the riverbank and set the bouquet of lilies he’d selected into the water and waited until they’d caught the current and drifted out of sight. 

Afterward, when he and Abbie were alone in her car, they agreed to go to her house. The merits of pizza versus Chinese takeout were discussed, and she listed several movies on her must-watch list that he’d yet to see. But as soon as they’d stepped over her threshold and closed the door behind them, he took her in his arms and kissed her thoroughly.

She broke the kiss and rested her palm on his chest, just where his scar lay hidden beneath his shirt. “Are you sure you’re ready for this? That this is what you want?”

He bent to rest his forehead against hers. “Beyond a shadow of a doubt.”

They made it to the bed despite first weighing the merits of the wall, the kitchen counter, and the dining table, but it was a near-run thing.

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, there will be a Chapter Two. Hopefully by the end of the month.


End file.
